Intense Debate Update

Sorry guys, but once again I’ve had to scrap my plans on using Intense Debate to manage comments. I encountered a number of problems, including a much slower load time – perhaps some of you noticed this. The forum boards are filled with other users who are experiencing similar problems. Perhaps ID will fix these bugs, but for now I am going to play it safe. A few comments were lost, but I managed to post the rest manually, which is why you will see my gravatar next to the comment. Everything is back to normal.

I hope you didn't run into the hellish comment spam problems I did when I managed to somehow get IntenseDebate turned on but Akismet turned off. I was getting thousands of spam comments a day pushed to my WP database but they weren't visible after IntenseDebate overlaid the built in comments and so I was completely stymied by the huge bandwidth sucking hole I'd fallen into.

Eventually I put in a plugin called “Bad Behavior” that helped keep the spammers from ever loading my page.

Actually, I never got that far with Intense Debate. I still have Akismet working alongside Disqus and I haven't had any problems. At some point I hope Disqus allows for comments via video like ID, but overall it seems much more user friendly.

I hope you didn't run into the hellish comment spam problems I did when I managed to somehow get IntenseDebate turned on but Akismet turned off. I was getting thousands of spam comments a day pushed to my WP database but they weren't visible after IntenseDebate overlaid the built in comments and so I was completely stymied by the huge bandwidth sucking hole I'd fallen into.

Eventually I put in a plugin called “Bad Behavior” that helped keep the spammers from ever loading my page.

Actually, I never got that far with Intense Debate. I still have Akismet working alongside Disqus and I haven't had any problems. At some point I hope Disqus allows for comments via video like ID, but overall it seems much more user friendly.

For the Civil War buffs among us, it’s really worth spending some time over at Kevin Levin’s blog, Civil War Memory. I can’t act like I discovered the place–some readers brought it to my attention. But it’s a great blog dealing in exactly what its title claims.